North Carolina: All things bright and beautiful

North Carolina's wild and unspoilt coast is one of the region's chief glories

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The picturesque lighthouse at Cape Hatteras

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North Carolinian towns keep popping up on America’s 'Best Towns to Live In' lists

12:01PM BST 06 Apr 2010

My wife’s from New Jersey, and I’m from the Deep South – of Zimbabwe. For years, neither of us wanted to live anywhere other than a city – first London, now New York. But with our one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn no longer able to accommodate my increasing girth and growing family, we decided to look elsewhere for a new home.

Grace fancied the New Jersey suburbs where she grew up; I wanted something more rural. In the end, the promise of easy living and a deep porch persuaded us to look below the Mason-Dixon Line. But this had its problems, too. I was keen on going far south – Georgia or Louisiana or Mississippi. My wife rolled her Yankee eyes at the thought of banjos and grits, and suggested somewhere in-between. So last summer we came up with a compromise and paid an extended visit to North Carolina.

I had been fascinated with North Carolina since moving to the United States six years ago. To me, there was something intriguing about a state that could produce two senators of such divergent political views (and ethics) as John Edwards and Jesse Helms. But, mostly, I was fascinated because North Carolinian towns I had never heard of – Chapel Hill, Wilmington, Asheville – kept popping up on America’s “Best Towns Live In” lists, and a booming area was being called the Research Triangle and referred to as the Silicon Valley of the south.

I asked Grace what was so good about these places but she had barely heard of them either. So we took a flight to Raleigh, the main city in the Research Triangle, to find out what the fuss was about.

The first thing I noticed was the smell: mint-fresh forests of towering pine rolled to the Appalachian horizon; the air seemed scented with azaleas. And that was just the airport. We cruised into Chapel Hill on a six-lane highway smooth as an autobahn. There was no mistaking it: North Carolina, or this part of it, was fragrant and rich.

It wasn’t always thus. A famous pre-Civil War expression described North Carolina as “a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit”. The phrase referred to the state being a very poor rural farming district sandwiched between the great plantation aristocracies of South Carolina and, to the north, the wealth and fine breeding of Virginia.

But these days North Carolina is having the last laugh. In the Fifties, local business and political leaders set about transforming the region, around Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, into a hi-tech centre for research and technology. By the Seventies, IBM and other corporations were opening offices and – boom – the Research Triangle was born. Today there are said to be more people with PhDs in the “Triangle” than anywhere else in America, and local universities Duke, UNC and UNC Chapel Hill are among the best in the country. It helps explain those “best towns to live in” lists.

We got our bearings at Chapel Hill’s Carolina Inn, billed as the classiest historic hotel in North Carolina. Built in 1924 on the edge of the prestigious UNC Chapel Hill campus, it was like stepping onto the set of Gone With the Wind: a colonial façade of towering pillars fronted an immaculate lawn; tapestries and mirrored walls lined its halls. They may barely do Afternoon Tea in Britain anymore, but they did here, and at 4pm we made our way down to a chandeliered, rose-strewn lobby, where a pianist tinkled jazz tunes and perfumed matriarchs held court over Devonshire Cream scones and cups of Jasmine Oolong served in heirloom china. There were four wedding parties staying at the hotel, and southern belles and their boys waltzed past with champagne flutes in hand.

I could have people-watched for hours – had a banjo not started up. Grace gave me a knowing look and rolled her eyes. But when we followed the music outside we came across an extraordinary sight: there, sipping mint juleps and dancing to a bluegrass quartet on the lawn, was what appeared to be the entire population of Chapel Hill, out for the hotel’s regular “Fridays on the Front Porch” summer music session. There must have been 100 people dancing, including grandparents, infants and hip college students. Our daughter Madeline was soon making friends by the bandstand, and Grace and I marvelled at the easy community of it all. “Hmm… don’t get this at home,” she purred.

Raleigh and Durham (the latter famous for its soaring neo-Gothic Duke Chapel, built in 1935 on the grounds of the local university) are the largest cities of the Triangle, but part of the appeal of the area is that it’s easy to live in a small village or on a farm, and still commute between any of the three towns in half an hour.

We decided to stay rural, and I fell hard for Hillsborough, 15 minutes west of Chapel Hill, a genteel magnolia-splashed hamlet with a historic district comprised of the most beautiful whitewashed Antebellum homes outside New Orleans. One deep-porch mansion was going for $450,000 (£302,000).

“That’s a studio in Brooklyn!” Grace spluttered.

In a sidewalk café on the main street we overheard a group of locals discussing the latest Jonathan Lethem book, Lethem being a neighbour of ours in Brooklyn. Hillsborough, it turned out, was something of a literary bolt-hole, and is home to some of North Carolina’s most famous authors, among them Allan Gurganus, whose Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All I had just finished reading. I wondered if he was in the café.

Grace’s other big fear about moving south was an assumed lack of good food. But the Triangle has become a renowned gastronomic centre in recent years, and a thriving farm-to-table movement has sprung up, a wave of dynamic chefs taking advantage of the bountiful produce grown on the farms of the surrounding Piedmont area.

I had the best Eggs Benedict of my life at Amy Tornquist’s Watts Grocery in Durham (it came with Andouille sausage and crayfish tail hollandaise), and later we tucked into succulent yang chow pork with tea-and-spice-smoked chicken, at celebrated Asian restaurant Lantern in downtown Chapel Hill. Chef-owner Andrea Reusing had opened the restaurant after moving from New York and discovering, to her horror, there was no Asian food in town. A few years later Gourmet magazine was rating hers one of the top 50 restaurants in America.

Best of all, though, was Herons, the flagship restaurant of a chic new hotel and spa resort, The Umstead, set in several acres of pine forest near the town of Cary. I’m not sure where chef Scott Crawford trained, but if a restaurant in Brooklyn does not start serving bacon-roasted quails and pheasants in burned honey sauce soon, I may have to move south just for this wonderful dish.

On day four we checked out of the Carolina Inn and into the Inn at Celebrity Dairy, a rustic, working goat farm outside a village called Pittsboro, 30 minutes west of Durham. The dairy makes a delectably creamy chèvre that it sells to farmers’ markets and restaurants throughout the Triangle. Best of all though, you get to stay on the farm. Madeline took a shine to the goats at milking hour, and in the evenings Grace and I sipped wine on rocking chairs on the porch, ate that chèvre, and watched fireflies light up the fields in front of the early 19th-century farmhouse. It had six rooms but we were the only guests, and if it wasn’t for the ear-shattering squawk of the farm’s pet peacock at night, we might never have left.

The Triangle’s other lure is the proximity of the Appalachian resort town of Asheville – the Aspen of the south – which is only three hours’ drive west, and the Atlantic Ocean, three hours the other way. We wanted time at the beach, and going on the principle that we were more likely to move to a town where there was work, drove south to historic Wilmington, the largest coastal city in North Carolina, on the Cape Fear coast.

Thanks to Robert Mitchum even I had heard of Cape Fear, but I knew nothing about Wilmington, so it came as something of a surprise to discover that it’s home to the largest movie studio in America outside Los Angeles (Screen Gems Studios) and known locally as “East Hollywood”. Dozens of feature films are shot here, as is the television series One Tree Hill. Katie Holmes lived in town when it was the location for Dawson’s Creek.

Given the name Cape Fear, I’d half expected a rugged, rock-strewn port with a population of delinquent jail-breakers. Instead, the 300-block historic district was like a live-in Victorian museum. Horse-drawn carriages trotted tourists past spectacular 18th-century colonial mansions; vintage river boats cruised the Cape Fear; locals in top hats touted ghost tours down oak-lined streets. Wilmington had for me the air of a well-behaved New Orleans Garden District.

It was stylish, too. In a formerly rundown area of river dock warehouses, local resident Linda Lavin, star of the Seventies series Alice, and her musician-actor husband, Steve Bakunas, had established a cutting-edge theatre group, Red Barn Studio.

Since we had already stayed in a colonial hotel and on a farm, and spent a lot of time marvelling at Antebellum architecture, we decided to go fashionable here, and checked into the Shell Island Resort on Wrightsville Beach, 10 minutes from downtown. This only made us more confused. We woke every morning at the hotel to a glorious view from our balcony of white sand, turquoise water and dolphins surfing the waves.

“I don’t know,” Grace said. “Maybe we need to look for a beachfront house, somewhere.” Our search for a new home continues.

GETTING THERE

Virgin Holidays (0844 557 3859; www.virginholidays.co.uk) offers seven nights’ fly-drive in the Carolinas from £419 per person, including flights with US Airways from London direct to Charlotte, and seven nights’ car hire; based on two adults travelling together and August 22-October 31 departures.